


The Buried Affair

by muzivitch



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-01
Updated: 2015-09-01
Packaged: 2018-04-18 10:28:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4702679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muzivitch/pseuds/muzivitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was his ritual. Coffee, flirting information out of a pretty waitress - like Claudia, who kept giggling as she told him everything about everyone in his sightline - and a cold-blooded kind of people-watching designed to give him a leg up.</p>
<p>If all of this had a downside, it was that sometimes Napoleon was multitasking just enough to get blindsided.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Buried Affair

Waverly had a strange streak of matchmaking for such a practical Brit, Napoleon thought as he watched Ilya and Gaby over the edge of his newspaper. He was never married to the girl, and he was quite sure he could pull it off. It wouldn’t have been the first time, after all, he thought with a bit of a twist to his lips that he easily hid from the other two. They weren’t really paying attention.

He turned his page and pretended to read the arts section of El Pais and listened to sounds of Madrid behind him. Killing time was what it was, and a few minutes later, he folded the paper and rose to his feet. That was enough to get the other two looking at him. “Coffee,” he explained. It was his usual excuse when he was going to go out and case a neighborhood. “You lovebirds should stick close. No newlyweds would be leaving their hotel room this fast. Maybe you should try jumping on the bed some,” he said to Gaby as he turned towards the exit. “Or be a little more authentic about it.”

The door was shut behind him before he heard the telltale thump against the wall. Hard to tell which of them it was, really.

*

He did get coffee, of course. Now that they’d been based in London - Waverly refused to consider anything else, and Ilya could give him the world’s most expressive look everytime he mentioned that New York would be a perfectly reasonable place to headquarter themselves - the number of times he could get a decent cup of coffee he didn’t make himself was frankly limited to the number of times the three of them were on a mission. It was his ritual. Coffee, flirting information out of a pretty waitress - like Claudia, who kept giggling as she told him everything about everyone in his sightline - and a cold-blooded kind of people-watching designed to give him a leg up.

If all of this had a downside, it was that sometimes Napoleon was multitasking just enough to get blindsided.

“Napoleon?” He heard, and the accent was neither Russian nor German. It wasn’t young, either, but had a mature kind of dignity that put his back up in more than one way. “It is you, isn’t it?”

He could lie, he thought, but Ysabel had always been too good at being able to tell when he was doing that. It had always been better to hit her with a charm offensive. She might see through that, too, but she expected it as her due - so he could get away with more.

“You’ve caught me,” he said, rising to kiss her hand and offer his seat. “I was hoping to surprise you later this week, but you had to go ruin the surprise.”

Ysabel’s smile was a little frail and more than a little skeptical, but Napoleon thought it was too much to expect anything less than that from a woman who’d once been his mother-in-law.

“Laura would not be happy if someone did not keep you on your toes,” she said gravely, and Napoleon dropped back into his own seat.

"No,” he agreed as he settled back in and steeled himself for what was guaranteed to be the most uncomfortable afternoon he’d had since his prison sentence was outsourced to the CIA.  “She wouldn’t, at that.”

*

He spent more hours at that cafe than he’d strictly planned, and accomplished a lot less than he’d intended when he left the hotel hours before, Napoleon thought as he let himself into his hotel and let his practiced smile fade off his face. Christ, what an exhausting day. The only upside was Ysabel’s grave announcement when he helped her up, that she and her sons (her sons had never liked him much) would be going to the Pyrenees for the month. The only thing that would have capped off the day would have been explaining to Waverly why he needed to be taken off the mission. And likewise, explaining it to the Peril and Gaby, because somehow that would have been unavoidable.

There was a knock at the door; of course there was. Napoleon put his face on and took a drink of his scotch before he opened the door to Ilya. “Yes?”

There was enough of a pause that Napoleon wondered if his face wasn’t completely in place yet. “You were out late,” the Russian finally said, though, and Napoleon shrugged.

“Sometimes it takes longer than I’d like,” he said as he waved Ilya inside. “I’m touched you missed me. I had no idea you felt that way.” He was always flippant, but there was a lingering edge of sharpness that was almost out of character.

Still, Ilya flashed him an irritated look as he stepped inside with his usual spare movements, so perhaps he was getting away with it, Napoleon thought as he swung the door shut behind him.

“I saw you walking a lady down the street,” the Russian said. “An older lady. Not your usual type.”

Or perhaps not. Napoleon’s lips tightened as he took a drink of his scotch and sat down in one of the leather club chairs in the suite’s sitting room. “You know it’s about what will get us the right information,” he said after a moment. “Not what the wrapping is around the right information.” The explanation would have worked on Gaby, who was still green. It might even have worked on Waverly, honestly.

Ilya raised an eyebrow.  “Did she have the right information?” he asked, and Napoleon frowned at him.

And oddly, for a moment, he considered the truth. But if his brief post-war marriage to a Spanish girl hadn’t made it into the KGB’s file on him - or at least the part they’d given Kuryakin - then it wasn’t in him to volunteer it. Later that night he’d wonder why he even consider it.

“No,” he said, and flashed a smirk. “Obviously, I’m having an off day.”

 

 


End file.
